


Orthomyxoviridae

by warsfeil



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 20:52:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1955751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warsfeil/pseuds/warsfeil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Akashi is sick at training camp, and each of the Teikou miracles have their own way of showing concern.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orthomyxoviridae

Akashi is exactly twenty-six minutes late to breakfast on the second day of their training camp. While punctuality has never been his strongest suit, he usually falls within a quarter of an hour. Nearly half an hour is more than pushing Nijimura's capacity to forgive, and so Nijimura rounds on Akashi as soon as he walks in, intent on reminding him that by being late he's directly disrespecting everyone else. Nijimura included.

It's then that Nijimura notices. Akashi's hair mirrors Kuroko's morning hair. He's still wearing his pyjamas, he has bags under his eyes, and he's about six shades paler than he should be.

"Akashi," Nijimura starts.

"Senpai," Akashi interrupts, voice softer than usual, worn around the edges with a hoarseness that can only come from too much coughing. "I don't feel very well."

"You look like shit," Aomine says around a mouthful of breakfast as he looks over at Akashi. Satsuki slaps him on the arm, then looks distinctly disgusted when she gets a clear view of Aomine's half-chewed breakfast.

Midorima immediately hurries over, taking Akashi's pulse and temperature in a matter-of-fact manner carefully designed not to show how worried he was.

"It's probably the flu," Nijimura says. Midorima ignores him, carefully checking Akashi's ears, eyes, and mouth. Akashi obediently allows it, saying "ah" when told and only wincing a little when Midorima uses his phone to check deep in Akashi's throat.

"It's probably," Midorima says, a few seconds later, "the flu."

Nijimura makes a deeply aggrieved face, but declines to point out that he had just said that. 

"Then let's get him back to bed," Nijimura says.

Midorima pushes his glasses up, still focused on Akashi. "Bed rest would be the best thing for him."

Nijimura resists the urge to flick Midorima in the forehead. 

"Come on," Nijimura says, grabbing Akashi by the shoulder and steering him towards the door. Akashi doesn't appear to have even noticed that the conversation is being played in double, which makes Nijimura wonders if Akashi's vision is any better.

Akashi takes a shaky step towards the door and then wobbles precariously. Nijimura sighs, leans down, and hefts Akashi up, tossing him over his shoulder like he's nothing more than a bag of flour.

"--senpai," Akashi says, immediately, latching a weak grip onto Nijimura's shirt. "This isn't necessary."

"Shut up."

Akashi does. 

Nijimura stiffly walks back into Akashi's designated room, sets him back down on the futon, and says, "Stay there."

Akashi does. 

He stays there so well, in fact, that by the time Nijimura manages to get out, get some tofu soup from the kitchen, and shoo the rest of the team away from crowding around Akashi's door, Akashi has fallen asleep.

Nijimura frowns. Setting the soup on the nightstand, he moves back out to assign everyone their practice for the day.

"You can take care of it," he tells Satsuki, who nods immediately as she continues handing out vitamins and all but wrapping Kuroko in a protective bubble lest he get sick as well.

It takes another ten minutes to convince the rest of the miracles to leave Akashi with his bed rest and go practice.

\--

Kise is the first to crack. He tells Nijimura that he has to go to the bathroom, and ignoring what he knows to be the penalties for lying, instead goes and carefully creaks open the door to Akashi's room.

"Akashicchi?" he asks, voice quiet, just in case the redhead is still trying to sleep. There's no response. This means one of two things: Akashi is sleeping, or Akashi is dead, and while Kise certainly hasn't heard of any awful viruses going around that are likely to strick middle school students and kill them, he feels it's his duty to make sure.

He creeps over to Akashi, moving as quietly as he can, and peers down at him. Akashi is swathed in blankets, rolled on his side, and the cloth that Nijimura dutifully placed on his forehead has fallen onto the futon.

Kise deliberates for a moment on how best to check Akashi's temperature -- he can't just use his hand, he's still all sweaty from practice, but he can't use his forehead, that's only out of romantic drama shows and anime -- and finally carefully inches his hand over to Akashi's wrist, intending to take his pulse.

Akashi, in his sleep, tucks his wrist under the blankets, pulling them further up to his chin. 

_No, Akashicchi!_ Kise thinks as loudly as he can, but does not say. If he can wake Akashi up through telepathy, that doesn't count as actually waking him up, right? Nijimura will be a lot less mad if Kise wakes him up via telepathy. Kise tries for another half a minute or so, repeating Akashi's name in various voices and volume levels within his own head, but he fails to get any reaction.

He's just going to have to go for the wrist, then. He reaches in again, carefully tugging the blankets away from Akashi's fingers, and --

"What are you doing?" Akashi asks, opening his eyes. His voice is weak and thick with sleep, and Kise immediately launches himself backwards, hands outstretched to protest his own innocence.

"I -- I was just checking on you, Akashicchi!" Kise realizes, somewhat belatedly, that he should have brought something. Soup or a drink or anything of the sort, and instead he's standing there empty handed, having woken up someone who clearly needs rest. In a panic, he seizes the soup Nijimura left earlier.

"Here, I brought you soup! Except -- no, wait, you can't have that, it's cold now," Kise manages, yanking the soup back away from Akashi and spilling some onto his basketball shorts. 

Akashi stares at Kise for a long moment. Then, in a tone that suggests that he's as weary as it is possible to be, he says: "Thank you." He rolls over onto his other side and pulls the blankets back up, up, up over his head, and the conversation is over.

Kise creeps back out, as quietly as he came. In the end, it's the soup stain visible on his shorts that gives him away, and all his protests about making sure Akashi wasn't dead fail to convince Nijimura not to give Kise extra laps. A lot of extra laps.

\--

Midorima is the next to enter Akashi's room. He has the sense to do it at lunch, so that no one is suspicious of a lengthy bathroom break. He doesn't soften his footsteps, nor does he make any effort to be any more quiet than he usually is. He simply walks in as though Akashi is fine, wakes him up by turning on the bedside light, and takes his temperature.

"Midori--" is all Akashi manages to get out before Midorima systematically begins stripping the bed of blankets.

"Stop," Akashi protests, knowing he sounds extremely feeble and not managing to care at that particular moment, because more important things were happening. Like his blankets being removed by the hands of his teammate, which seemed like a deep, deep betrayal of trust.

"Your fever is rising. You feel cold, but you're only making it worse, and if it goes up more than two more degrees, we'll have to take you to the hospital," Midorima says briskly.

"You don't have a good beside manner," Akashi shoots back, tugging his remaining blanket back up and holding onto it as tightly as possible in case Midorima tries to take it, too.

"Take these," Midorima orders, putting down a few small pills and a glass of water. "I'll check on you again at dinner."

"Please don't talk to me about dinner," Akashi says quietly as Midorima is leaving, and means it.

\--

"Hey," Aomine calls from the doorway, voice just loud enough to rouse Akashi from his sleep.

Akashi blinks at him blearily, but does not answer. He's fairly certain his voice would resemble a frog's, and there's absolutely nothing elegant about that.

Aomine shifts from one foot to the other. Scratches his head awkwardly. "Do you need anything?" he asks, finally, trying to act like he knows how you're supposed to treat a sick person. The last time he tried to take care of Satsuki, he almost set her kitchen on fire, and managed to turn all her sheets pink in the wash.

Akashi shakes his head slowly. 

"Okay," Aomine says, agreeably enough, and leaves.

"Mmn," Akashi offers by way of polite thanks, contemplating the merits of pulling the pillow over his head for silence against the likelihood of smothering himself in his sleep.

\--

Murasakibara doesn't come in so much as sneak in. He can move surprisingly quietly for a boy his size, and Akashi might not have noticed his entrance at all if he hadn't forgotten to stop chewing one of his snacks.

Akashi withdraws his head from the blankets and looks at Murasakibara. Murasakibara looks back on steadily, eating a piece of... something that appears to be made entirely of chocolate, the idea of which makes Akashi's stomach wrench in automatic agony. 

Murasakibara leans over and sets down two things: a pocari, and a package of limited edition cucumber melon puccho. He waits until Akashi reaches out to take the pocari to say anything.

"This will make Aka-chin feel better," he says, with absolute confidence, as though sweets on a stomach were a good idea and had never been known to worsen anyone's flu. 

Akashi stares at him for a long moment, mind too cloudy to even manage to think of anything grateful to say in response. He doesn't get the chance, though, because Murasakibara leans down, pats him firmly on the head and leaves.

It takes three swallows of pocari for Akashi's stomach to rebel.

\--

Kuroko does not visit him, but Momoi does. It's dinnertime, and she wakes him up with a smile and a much better bedside manner than Midorima.

"I brought you dinner," she says, and it's nothing but broth and bread. She helps tip Akashi upright, support him with more pillows than he realized they had, and steadies the bowl so he can sip at the broth. He waits a solid sixty seconds between each sip, to make sure he isn't in danger of pushing himself over the limit on what his stomach can handle. He coughs after every other sip, and Momoi patiently takes the bowl every time she sees the cough coming, so that it won't spill.

"Tetsu-kun wanted to visit you, but we were worried you might still be contagious," Momoi says, cheerfully rattling off the state of things without a care in the world. Akashi supposes he might sound the same, if he wasn't currently convinced that he had the eleventh plague, and that it was influenza. 

"And Ki-chan got in trouble for lying about sneaking out to see you earlier, but he'll be okay. And-- what's that?" Momoi stops mid-conversation to peer at something ensconced in the pillows at the far side of the futon. 

Akashi weighs his curiosity against his desire not to move, and finally decides he'll move, if only to help satisfy Momoi, too. He sets his bowl down and removes the item, feeling deeply aggrieved by how little muscle strength he has. 

It's a large bumblebee plush toy, and Akashi has no idea where it came from. 

"Momoi-san," he says, quietly, looking at the bumblebee and frowning as deep as he can. "I think you should leave. I've started to hallucinate."

"I see it too," Momoi offers, but stands up anyway. She's always been both attentive and intelligent, and she fills his cup back up with fresh, lukewarm water before leaving with the still half-full soup bowl. 

Akashi sets the bee in the chair she vacated and stares at it, perplexed, until he falls back asleep.

\--

Akashi dreams in the most surreal fashion. In his dream, he is a small boy again, no more than eight, with cat ears and a tail. He's walking around Shiba Koen calling for his mother, but every time he tries to call her, it comes out as a meow instead. People are pointing and laughing, and he decides that he will climb to the top of the Tokyo Tower in order to find her, only to discover that the tower is closed for routine maintenance, taking care of an infestation of angry bumblebees with messy hair that keep threatening to steal the skills of the tower security. In the end, it's okay, because a large gorilla lifts Akashi up until he's at the top of the tower.

He isn't sure he finds his mother, in the end, but he feels arms wrap around him at the end of the dream, and when he wakes up it takes a second to realize that he isn't asleep and his mother has been dead for years and that the arms wrapped around him are still there.

"You looked like you were having a bad dream," Nijimura says quietly, pulling back and looking at Akashi with concern. Concern on Nijimura looks a lot like irritation; his brows are drawn together and he's doing the lip thing that Akashi finds endearing, but his eyes are worried and he hasn't taken his hands off of Akashi's shoulder. "Guess Midorima's lucky item didn't keep it away."

"I was lost," Akashi replies, staring at the bumblebee, glad to at least know what that's all about. The words are the closest he can come to describing the dream. It's already beginning to fade away into a familiar ache. Soon, he knows, he won't remember the details, only that he was dreaming of his mother, which he can rationalize as a perfectly understandable response to having the eleventh plague. He doesn't think any lucky bumblebees would keep a dream like that away.

"Well," Nijimura says, a little awkwardly, "I've got you."

Akashi looks at him for a long moment, and considers all the things that he should do. Take a shower, more than likely. Change the bedding, change his clothing, attempt eating again, drink some water. He does none of these things, and instead leans back against the pillows, hand still weakly holding onto Nijimura's shirt in a thinly veiled attempt to drag him over.

"Yes," Akashi agrees. "You found me."

Akashi dutifully pretends that he didn't see Nijimura blush, and Nijimura dutifully tucks Akashi in.

Akashi sleeps much better, this time, and no one wakes him up until morning.

**Author's Note:**

> Orthomyxoviridae is the family that influenza belongs to (among other viruses), because I couldn't think of a better name for this. I definitely did not have anyone beta this, so there may be typos I didn't catch.


End file.
